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A Young Clown Follows in a Father’s Giant Footsteps

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Down Clown Alley, in the backstage tent for Circus Smirkus, a slight boy of 14 studies his clown self in a jagged piece of mirror. This is Sam Ferlo, the son of a former circus clown and a former circus showgirl, and the godson of a man once known as the Human Cannonball.

Guess what Sam wants to join when he grows up.

Seeing the need for a touch more of the garish, the boy dabs a finger into the greasepaint he keeps in his most precious possession, a makeup kit that is small, red and well traveled. His every move is watched by the tiny photograph of a clown taped to the inside of the kit’s lid. Practice, this clown tells the boy. Take clowning seriously. And always: Be big.

Throughout New England and parts of upstate New York, summer means that the traveling youth circus called Circus Smirkus will once again be pitching its tents on dry-grass fields, inviting one and all to see circus acts performed with precision by the summer-camp young. Tightrope walkers. Acrobats. Jugglers. And clowns, but not the scary kind.

This year the troupe has nine clowns, including Sam, the smallest. Hunched now in a fold-out chair, dwarfed by steamer trunks and surrounded by other teenagers tending to their looks (“Do my eyebrows work?” one asks), Sam paints his cheeks, pats his face with a white sock packed with baby powder and studies with a portraitist’s care the clown face about to be shared with another fidgeting audience in the big-top tent a few yards away.

Nearly 30 years ago, the train for the blue team of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus pulled away from Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard, a clown named Ted Ferlo and a showgirl named Mary Beth Combs in tow. The clown car was close to the showgirl car and, well, things between them blossomed like a bouquet of paper flowers.

When the train reached Rhode Island, Ted summoned the nerve to ask Mary Beth out for a slice of pizza. They were a team after that. She strutted about in feathery costumes, and he worked hard for laughs as a kind of Chaplin type. But he was definitely his own clown.

They took some time off after Ted injured himself falling from his stilts, but came back to join the circus’s red team and were part of the final tour of the animal trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams. They got engaged in an elevator before rehearsals for a show in New Jersey. The ring presented by Ted neither buzzed nor squirted water. It was for real.

They got married in Rome — the Rome of upstate New York, Ted’s hometown — during a short break in 1991, rejoined the circus and quit at the end of that season. After briefly trying to make it in show business in Manhattan, the couple returned to Rome, got what Mary Beth calls “regular jobs,” and began raising two sons, Sebastian and Sam.

But Ted kept his white-gloved hand in the game by becoming a marketing manager at the nearby Turning Stone Resort Casino, which allowed him to hire some of his circus friends. He also performed occasionally at the casino and at various fund-raising events, but only after rehearsing for hours in his garage or basement. He was a perfectionist.

The Ferlo boys became enthralled with clowning, especially Sam. At the age of 2 or 3, he began watching videotapes of Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. “You could tell he was studying them,” his mother says.

Photo

Sam's parents were circus performers when they met 30 years ago; his father was a clown and his mother was a showgirl.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Ted soon began to include his sons in the act. They practiced their balance on a board and cylinder called a rola bola, learned how to juggle and became comfortable on unicycles. He taught them how to make every movement count, from a raised eyebrow to a pratfall.

“Make it big with your whole body,” Sam says his father would say.

But behind every “washerwoman gag,” with the three of them slapping one another with wet rags, and behind every “dead-and-alive gag,” with Sam playing a stiff-as-a-board stiff, were days of grueling, unfunny rehearsal. This is what it takes, his father would tell him.

Sam listened. He wanted to be like his father. Ted, though, was a worrier. When not wearing greasepaint, he worried about his job, his kids, his life; Mary Beth says he sometimes had trouble keeping the pressures of the world at bay.

Last summer, Ted helped Sam develop a short audition tape to submit to Circus Smirkus, a nonprofit organization that accepts only a few youths a year to join its troupe of about 30. Ted appears briefly in the tape, and only to assist Sam, who balances on his chin a wooden ladder that, at six feet, is a foot taller than he is.

A few months later, Ted died at 47, the cause of death described as an aneurysm complicated by hypertension. Many friends from his circus days came to the wake.

Sebastian and Sam miss their dad “something awful,” Mary Beth says. But they had to get on with it. For Sam, that meant getting on with becoming a clown.

His videotaped audition impressed the organizers at Circus Smirkus enough to earn him a live audition, in January. This time he balanced a wheelbarrow on his chin. The good news: He was selected. The bad news: It costs $5,000 for a Smirkus summer of circus arts and confidence-building.

But word had spread of Ted’s kid, the would-be clown. Money sent by circus friends in Florida, and California, and Illinois, poured into an educational fund set aside for the Ferlo boys. A handsome donation was also made by Kenneth Feld, the chief executive of Feld Entertainment Inc., which owns Ringling Brothers. Sam’s training as a clown, then, would continue.

After finishing eighth grade, Sam packed off to Greensboro, Vt., for three long weeks of training. By the season opener on July 3, the first of 67 performances, he had his attire, which includes a red shirt, blue suspenders and a green bow tie, and his persona, which he describes as a mash-up of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel, with a touch of Ted Ferlo.

But he is still learning.

In the quiet time between the afternoon and evening performances, Troy Wunderle, 38, the troupe’s artistic director and a former Ringling Brothers clown of uncommon elasticity, works with Sam and a few other clowns to improve a three-minute water bit that involves a gallon’s worth of splashes and spit takes.

Mr. Wunderle works through the gag as though it were a vexing math problem — “Spit or splash?” he wonders — while also giving encouragement and advice to Sam and the others: Take the beat here. Do a slow burn at this point. Here is where you don’t need extra movement.

Sam nods but says little, as if in honor of his silent-film heroes. When the lesson ends, he eats dinner and heads back to Clown Alley, past a unicycle on its side, past a table of juggling balls and felt hats. He opens his makeup kit, the one that Ted Ferlo used to use when he, too, was a clown.

With that photograph of his father watching from the kit’s inside lid, the small boy begins again the process of becoming big.

A version of this article appears in print on July 29, 2011, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Son Follows Giant Footsteps Into the Big Tent. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe